Even in my self-admitted SAO fanboy head, I wouldn’t say A-1 Pictures has the best of reputations, and among the anime community at large they certainly do not. The essence of the common complaints I [...]
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For anyone who has read our annual Year in Review articles, it should come as no surprise that I hold From the New World (Shin Sekai Yori) in high esteem. It is the best anime to come out 2013 and one [...]
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Human history was full of blood and terror. The new world was not so different except that in this new world, we were better at covering up the blood and terror. This article contains major spoiler. [...]
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(There are plenty of spoilers here.)
This is sort of a reaction to Bobduh's articulate review,
where he covers both why the show is excellent and why despite this it
leaves him cold. While I've come [...]
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(Major spoilers here.)
The following is probably obvious, but once you start following the dots
at the end of the show it's clear that what happened with the queerrats
is almost inevitable. Right now [...]
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It all started when @A_Libellule
and I got into a Twitter discussion about this particular issue. In
the course of the discussion I had a realization about my core moral
position here:
If a group has [...]
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Like any good anime did to me, watching Shin Sekai Yori (aka From the New World) gave me lots of things to write about. In this post, I am focusing on the elements that set this anime from most other … Continue reading →
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Like any good anime did to me, watching Shin Sekai Yori (aka From the New World) gave me lots of things to write about. In this post, I am focusing on the elements that set this anime from most other … Continue reading →
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Shin Sekai Yori/From The New World is a show from last season. While it was airing some people have suggested I watch it – I looked over the plot synopsis, I looked over the synopsis of the first 6 episodes, and apparently very little happened, so I didn’t watch the show. Then while looking for […]
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Shin Sekai Yori/From The New World is a show from last season. While it was airing some people have suggested I watch it – I looked over the plot synopsis, I looked over the synopsis of the first 6 episodes, and apparently very little happened, so I didn’t watch the show. Then while looking for […]
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From the New World is one of the most intriguing shows of recent years - just how would humanity deal with the emergence of telekinetic powers that gives those who possess them the ability to kill with a thought? And how would people with those powers treat humans who didn't have them? In both cases, the answer is "badly"...
Read more...
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Shin Sekai Yori is a 25-episode series produced by A-1 Pictures and released by Aniplex. Shin Sekai Yori had by far the most intriguing storyline of any anime I’ve seen recently, but it lacked in other areas, which prevented the series from becoming a masterpiece. I’m going to do this review a bit differently and look [...]
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It turns out that I have more to say about Shin Sekai Yori than
I've already written. Today is some things
about Squealer (aka Yakomaru).
(There are spoilers here for SSY's final arc.)
In some of the commentary I've read it's popular to say that Squealer
deserved to die for what he did (but not necessarily die in the way
that he did). My strong opinion is that to say this is to misread Shin
Sekai Yori's message. To put it one way, no one in SSY is coming to the
table with clean hands. If Squealer deserves to die for what he did and
tried to do to the Cantus humans, then a bunch of Cantus humans deserve
to die for what they repeatedly did to queerat colonies. To talk only
about what Squealer deserves is to fall straight into some degree of the
anti-queerat prejudices that the show rubs our faces in and is especially
striking after the final revelation about queerat origins. Justice against
Squealer but no justice against anyone else is not really justice, it is
the selective exercise of the master's power against the uppity slaves.
(I find it especially striking that one of the charges against Squealer
is that he sent soldiers off to die. Here's a newsflash: that's part
of what commanders do in wars. One of a commander's jobs is to send
people off to die if necessary. There is no evidence that Squealer sent
soldiers off to die for no purpose and little evidence that the queerat
goals could have been achieved with lesser measures. Sadly this is the
kind of thing that you have to resort to when you're fighting a vastly
superior foe, especially with the life of your people on the line.)
I've also seen commentary that the village's memorial museum for the
war is a hopeful sign. I am less optimistic; especially considering
that the centerpiece of the memorial was Squealer's tortured remains,
the memorial strikes me as far more of a 'never forget what the queerats
tried to do to us' thing than anything else. As long as the memorial
stands and people tour it and so on, I doubt anyone in the village is
going to consider queerats harmless or safe in the way that they did in
Saki's era before the attack.
(The likely consequences of this attitude are left as an exercise for
the reader because they depress me.)
Sidebar: did Squealer have to go to war?
My answer is yes. His choices (and the choices of the Robber Fly colony
and the queerats as a whole) were to remain an oppressed, backwards,
and limited existence or to revolt. Although the Cantus humans were
complacent about the technological and other development of the Robber
Fly colony, I'm pretty sure that this would have limits; at a certain
point they would either stop the development or more likely decide that
it had gone too far and wipe the colony out wholesale.
Let us be honest and straightforward here: the queerats were slaves of
the Cantus humans. The villages were never going to allow the queerats
to escape that and live truly free, even if the queerats left the Cantus
humans alone. Cantus humans simply do not tolerate things that they
consider to be potential threats.
(Remember that the very first time we saw queerats, they were doing
maintenance work around the village area.)
(One comment.)
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My overall summary of Shin Sekai Yori is that it's an ambitious show
of an ambitious story that succeeded at delivering on both (although
as an ambitious show and story there are bits that people feel didn't
work). As a whole the show is a powerful, affecting work with a wide
emotional range and a lot of things to think about. My personal view is
that the show is very well directed and animated and that its periodic
experiments don't take away from that, but I'm not a stickler for
traditional animation.
(Shin Sekai Yori also had a great ending episode, one of the best
that I've seen. It was surprising, powerful, and well directed all
throughout, with pieces that people were quoting and alluding to from
the moment it aired.)
I can summarize my overall views this way: if Shin Sekai Yori is not
at the top of my 'best N in 2013' list, I'll be very happy because I'll
have seen something even better than it in the rest of this year.
Liked: very much.
Rewatch: Possibly. This is one of the rare shows where I can imagine
myself enjoying it a second time around.
(There are spoilers from now on.)
One of the things that the show excelled at was taking people
doing horrible things and showing us why they had to do them.
Pretty much everyone in the show is trapped in situations with no
easy or good answers. The result is that, as I wrote on Twitter (spoilers in
that conversation), a lot of people in SSY deserve death to some degree
and don't to some degree. There are no shining heroes, just people
doing the best that they can in a terrible situation. To me this made
the characters feel more like people than, well, the protagonists of an
anime. Call it a feeling of realism.
One part of this realism is that Saki and Satoru never particularly
overcame the fundamental prejudices of their society, even when they
were slapped in the face about them. Here I'm thinking particularly
about their attitudes towards the bakenezumi (aka the queerats). Even
Saki never really treats them as equals or fully people; to me this
is particularly striking in what she unhesitatingly and more or less
casually asks of Kiromaru in the last episode. Although other people
may read the situation differently, to me Saki acted as if she was
entitled to Kiromaru's sacrifice.
(I tweeted a version of this thought:
1,
2,
3.)
One of the things I believe about the setting is that Cantus
users are dying out over the long term because of what they're
doing to their own population level (this may be good news). While their
raw birthrate is probably at or above their replacement rate, the problem
is that they kill a significant number of their children in childhood.
There's no sign that they make up for this with either unusually large
families or unusually long lives; if anything, things seem to tilt the
other way. I can't remember many mentions of (surviving) siblings in
the whole show and the primary cast all seem to be single children.
(In Saki's case it's a plot point that her older sister didn't surive
and that this put a great deal of stress on her parents; they didn't
seem inclined to have a third child under pretty much any circumstances.
My best evidence for people's lives not being unusually long is that
Saki initially guessed that the elderly-looking Tomiko was 62.)
Other people have said more about Shin Sekai Yori and
done it more coherently than I. See, for example, shibireru darou on
episodes 24 and 25 and their roundup.
The Cart Driver
has a somewhat different take because Inushinde sees more flaws in the
show than I do (the flaws may be there, but if so they didn't bother me
next to everything else the show was doing).
(I've written less about Shin Sekai Yori than I have about Psycho-Pass
because SSY is a better and clearer show.)
Update: I wound up with some more things to say about Squealer, which
I put in ShinSekaiYoriSquealer.
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Shin Sekai Yori (新世界より) Shin sekai yori, as a series, certainly had its fair share of pleasant surprises. Considering how the original source material for this series was an award-winning novel series in Japan, I guess the surprises should have been somewhat expected, and yet, this series still managed to defy expectations. Shin sekai yori [...]
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Having watched the anime faithfully week after week since it started, I can say for certain that this anime is truly awesome. Each episode always left me wanting for more. For the past six months, this anime has got to … Continue reading →
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